The tyranny of the anecdote
Magazine stories are rife with them: The "anecdotal" beginning ("lede"), a tale of some woman (or man) who has suffered from a malady, overcome a common problem, or what have you.
Or maybe you've seen it in a meeting. You propose an idea -- say, that there's no reason to have a weekly meeting just to be sure that everyone is still doing their job -- and someone else mentions that a department at her sister's company stopped their weekly meetings and everything fell apart.
It's the tyranny of the anecdote. In a world of 7 billion people, you can find stories of anything. There is no particular validity to an anecdote as evidence. And yet we use them all the time (see above!) and give incredible weight to them. Why is that?
It's a question explored at length in Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his work on how the human brain actually makes decisions. And it turns out that we love stories. Hear a "fact" -- say, that people who prefer Pepsi to Coke are more likely to believe in aliens -- and your brain immediately constructs a plausible story line for why that might be. Of course, if you heard the reverse, you could construct a story line for that as well. The brain likes to process things into neat narratives, and then views these narratives as true by virtue of their coherence.
Kahneman is the author of the ultimate example of this, the famous "Linda" problem. You read a story about how Linda, an outspoken philosophy major, participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations in college. Then you are asked which is the more likely scenario for Linda, at age 31: Linda is a bank teller, or Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
We all want to say it's more likely that she's a feminist bank teller, though this is logically incorrect. Feminist bank tellers are a subset of all bank tellers, so it's emphatically more likely that she's a bank-teller in general than one active in any particular "movement." But the story of Linda as continued activist makes sense. So we deem it more likely.
Anecdotes make ideas vivid. They put a picture of someone in our heads -- and humans like other humans -- and they give us a story. And since we like stories, we're inclined to believe them. This is always something I've hated with writing columns, that I feel the need to track down a "real person" for everything. But as Kahneman points out, the brain is not going to be easily changed.
And so, the tyranny of the anecdote continues. Best to use it to your advantage, coming up with your own vivid anecdote for any particular point you wish to illustrate.
